Now as 2013 gets underway, there’s little buzz about pending tech IPOs in a changed landscape. Social media startups are out, cloud computing and big data are in, and new securities law will reduce the public scrutiny (and often some excitement) of companies thinking of going public.

There were some decent tech deals in 2012, but the best were in the area of corporate computing such as Workday Inc.,
WDAY, -0.70%
the cloud-based human resources software company, a trend expected to continue into this year.

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“Certainly post-Facebook, there were many good IPOs,” said Scott Sweet, senior managing partner at the IPO Boutique. “It wasn’t the catastrophic hit to technology that some investors and analysts thought.”

Now as 2013 gets in high gear with everyone back at work this week, investors are looking ahead to see what’s next. But they are having a hard time locating many tech IPOs in the pipeline at the moment. The U.S. presidential election last November and the worries about the fiscal cliff at the end of the year put a damper on deal-making toward the end of 2012.

But an even bigger factor is the U.S. JOBS (Jumpstart Our Business) Act now in full swing. The JOBS act, which lets emerging companies file confidential registration statements to the Securities and Exchange Commission, is creating a quieter, different kind of environment for IPOs.

“There is a lot going on, there are quite a few companies in process at the moment, but they don’t have to show their cards because of the JOBS Act,” said Lise Buyer, principal at Class V Group, an IPO advisory firm.

Indeed Workday was one of the first companies in tech this past autumn to take advantage of the confidential filing process. Its IPO did well and as of Monday, its shares were up 6.8% from its IPO closing price. Read about Workday's successful IPO.

“You don’t want companies to go public that are immature and cannot forecast well enough in their first few quarters out,” said Maha Ibrahim, a general partner in the Silicon Valley office of venture capital firm Canaan Partners. “That’s not good for a public company.” Companies filing under the confidential “secret veil” of the JOBS Act can test the water. “They can give themselves a quarter or two to understand their business,” she said. “Then if something happens, they can choose to go ahead or hold back.”

Still, it makes it harder for investors to get a sense of the IPO pipeline.

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Workday’s IPO last year could set the trends for 2013: It’s in the business is selling services to other businesses, and it was one of the first companies to take advantage of the more secretive procedures of the JOBS Act.

For example, last October, Bloomberg News reported that Violin Memory Inc., a developer of flash memory designed for corporate data centers, had filed for an IPO at a $2 billion valuation under the JOBS Act. Not a peep has been heard from the company, which declined to comment. If and when the company and regulators deem it ready to go, investors will have a much shorter window in which to study all the public documents.

“It’s 21 days before the road show starts,” said Rick Kline, a partner with Goodwin Procter LLP in Menlo Park, Calif. “It really ends up being a minimum of 30 days,” that investors have to study the public filings. “I have not heard any complaints that it is not enough time,” Kline added. “These days, 30 days is kind of an eternity to analyze a company.”

Investors looking for back-and-forth correspondence between a company and the SEC will have to study the record, as opposed to seeing it played out before them in real time, as they witnessed with Groupon’s problematic IPO. See commentary on Groupon's IPO delay.

Whether that is a good or bad thing is a point of debate. “Certainly investors learned a lot about Groupon and the challenges the company faced dealing with the SEC,” Buyer said. “It’s a shame that investors will longer get the chance to watch those acrobatics. Anyone who is truly industrious can go back and read all the filings and amendments. But certainly they won’t get all the media attention.”

So the first part of 2013 may include a lot of conjecture until a company actually files its first public documents with the SEC.

For now, the general view is that the best potential candidates will, like Workday, be in the corporate computing arena, and social media will not be popular.

While some have predicted that Twitter Inc. might try to go public in 2013, others don’t think so. “I hear 2014 more for Twitter,” said Anand Sanwal, CEO and co-founder of CB Insights. “With them it is figuring out the advertising model and I think there is some hangover from Facebook. That is really poisoning the well,” he said, at least for social media companies.

“Enterprise is where the big performance has been,” Sanwal added. Companies he has on his list for 2013 include a few in cloud computing, big data, and data-center technology, such as Box, a cloud company for storing mobile data; Palantir Technologies, software which analyzes data; and possibly even Dropbox, a cloud storage and sharing service.

Kline said that he believes investors will begin to start seeing some public filings at the end of January.

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